What SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 actually cost in 2026.
Independent cost ranges, sourced and dated. No vendor pitch. For a 25 to 50 employee SaaS pursuing first-time SOC 2, year-one budgets typically sit at £25,000 – £80,000 depending on audit type, scope, and whether a GRC platform is in the picture.
Ranges aggregate published auditor pricing, GRC platform tiers, and buyer-reported figures as of April 2026. Full sourcing notes live on the methodology page.
Where the budget goes
Four components account for almost all year-one SOC 2 spend. The relative share shifts with company size and audit type. Below 30 employees, readiness and remediation dominate; above 100 employees, the audit fee scales faster than everything else. Each card links to the driver page where the assumptions and worked examples sit.
Hours of partner, manager, senior, staff time at firm-tier rates.
Big 4 only when downstream buyers (banks, defence) require it. Most series-B SaaS pays mid-tier rates.
Gap analysis, policy authoring, evidence map, remediation engagement.
Where the readiness reveals significant gaps, remediation can run 5 to 10x the readiness fee.
Per-FTE platform contracts, scaling with company size and frameworks pursued.
Earns its fee with multi-framework programmes (SOC 2 + ISO 27001 + GDPR). Single-framework startups often net negative.
200 to 500 hours of senior engineering or security time at £75 fully-loaded.
The line item every founder underestimates. Visible in the P&L only as missed product roadmap.
Five questions every CFO asks before approving
Below are the recurring questions in finance committee meetings on SOC 2 spend. Each links to the page where the full reasoning, with worked examples, is set out.
For a 30 to 60 employee SaaS at mid-tier CPA, scope of Security plus Confidentiality, yes. Above £45,000 needs Big 4 justification or extra scope. Below £18,000 needs scrutiny on the firm's accreditation and approach.
If a customer accepts Type 1 today and Type 2 in nine months, run Type 1. If they will wait, skip Type 1 and save the fee. Half-decisions waste both Type 1 and Type 2 budget.
Above 30 to 50 employees and pursuing more than one framework, yes. Below that, a spreadsheet plus a good auditor often costs less in cash but more in FTE concentration.
Year 2 audit costs around 80 to 90 percent of year 1 audit fees. Readiness drops out, tooling persists. Most teams under-budget here. Year 3 is roughly stable with year 2.
Roughly 80 percent of the SOC 2 Common Criteria control set maps directly onto ISO 27001 Annex A. Concurrent audits typically save 30 to 40 percent on combined fees. Sequential audits do not benefit from the overlap.
Sanity-check your scenario
Enter a few facts about the organisation and the calculator returns a defensible year-one range, the year 2 and 3 cost, and the three-year total. Math is transparent on the methodology page. The full version with platform-vs-spreadsheet toggle is on the calculator page. No email is captured to release the result.
- Audit firm fees£13,200 – £24,800
- Readiness and remediation£10,200 – £19,200
- GRC platform£8,000 – £14,000
- Internal time£4,200 – £7,900
What teams underestimate
The cost lines on a SOC 2 SOW are knowable. The lines that are not on the SOW are where budgets break. Evidence collection takes longer than estimated almost every time: screenshots of access reviews, sample tickets, vendor attestations, and onboarding records all take engineering time that was not in the implementation plan. A reasonable rule of thumb is to multiply the consultant's evidence-time estimate by 2.5x for the first audit cycle.
Scope creep mid-audit is common. A new product line ships during the observation window, a new region opens, an additional Trust Services Criterion is requested by a customer halfway through readiness. Each adds 10 to 25 percent to the cost line that was approved at the start. The cleanest defence is a written scope statement signed with the auditor before observation begins, with named contractual exclusions.
The senior-FTE 50% time cost is consistently understated. A first-time SOC 2 demands roughly 200 to 500 hours of a senior security or engineering lead, plus another 100 to 200 hours distributed across HR, finance, IT, and product. At a £75 fully-loaded hourly rate that is £15,000 to £45,000 of internal time that does not appear on the vendor SOW. Fintech and payments scale-ups typically run SOC 2 alongside KYC and AML programme spend, and procurement reviews tend to look at the combined operational cost rather than each line in isolation. The KYC side of that budget is detailed at kyccost.com.
Year-2 cost is almost always under-budgeted. Most CFO conversations stop at the year-one figure. The 80 to 90 percent year-2 audit cost, plus persistent platform subscription, plus the senior-engineer time required to renew evidence, lands as a surprise. The cost shape is on the ongoing-cost page.
A reference, not a sales asset
This site exists because every other top-ranking page on SOC 2 cost is owned by someone selling something. The intent here is the opposite: publish defensible ranges, show the assumption set, source the figures, and let the reader make the decision. There is no email gate on the calculator. There is no chat widget. There is one advisory contact form on the methodology page, and one sentence about who runs the site. Where Impact-network affiliate relationships exist with GRC platforms, this is disclosed on the page where the platform appears, not hidden.
If a quote is in front of you, the audit-firm fees page will tell you whether it is in band. If you want a single defensible budget figure for a CFO conversation, the calculator will produce one and the methodology page will tell you how it was derived.
Six questions, briefly
The condensed version. The full set lives on the FAQ page.